


Low Stakes

by Merkwerkee



Category: Masters of the Metaverse (Web Series)
Genre: Gore, child sidekicks, nothing happens TO the kid he just gets to see something bloody
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:01:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27645187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: The hero known as Iconoclast - Blue to his friends and coworkers - bites off a little more than he can chew and finds himself stuck.





	Low Stakes

Blue coughed, and red dotted the concrete slab less than four inches from his nose.

The memories leading up to this point were somewhat hazy - villain named Earthshaker? Resonance powers? Las Vegas? - but the situation as it stood seemed pretty clear. The only light was shining through chinks in the rubble all around him, but it was enough to show him the six inches of rebar sticking out of his upper torso. Of course, on the heels of that realization came the crashing wave of pain that having rebar jammed through your soft and fleshy bits generally entailed. He resisted the urge to cough again as he felt more blood welling up his throat; the motion would only tear him up more as his muscles tried to move around the obstruction.

Blue shifted, and was rewarded with a spray of pebbles and an ominous groan. He stopped moving quickly, and waited for the structure to re-stabilize. How had he ended up under what felt like forty tons of building? He wracked his mind, trying to remember, and hazy images floated to the surface; standing at a map table with half a dozen other superheroes, Bombshell 2.0 striding in, another map on the table - another bank robbery - and some discussion. In the end, they’d decided to send Iconoclast (him) for strategy, Bombshell for civilian assistance, and Titan to deal with the villain.

For some reason, thought of Titan struck a chord. Blue wracked his brain trying to remember. Baker wasn’t the nicest of men, true, and he tended to revel in his power too much, but that was old news. Blue had been trying to get him to see reason for years. No, it was something else to do with Titan. Someone else. Someone…Someone…

 _“Butch,”_ Blue gasped quietly.

Butch Baker was Bob Baker’s nephew, and when the kid’s parents had sent him to live with the guy Baker had decided to make the kid his sidekick. Blue had objected strenuously; no matter what powers the kid did or didn’t have, the safety and security of the nation was neither his responsibility nor his duty. Baker had responded by bequeathing a fraction of his powers on the kid, and Blue had very nearly come to blows with the man; it didn’t _matter_ if the kid was now bulletproof, he was too young to be shot at.

Still, no matter what Blue tried, Titan now had Kid Titan as his sidekick and the two went together everywhere - ostensibly so Butch could learn the ropes, but Blue had yet to see Baker teach the boy anything. Titan was always in the thick of it, shrugging off bullets and other physical weapons with an almost contemptuous ease, and he tended to only be called out for the most dangerous of fights anyway. From the way Butch fought, the most he’d learned from Baker was to get up every time you were hit, laugh it off, and run in to be hit again. Blue had seen the kid get hit through two walls, get up with an obvious concussion, then activate his rocket boots to do it all over again.

Blue grimaced as the memories started to come back. Earthshaker had been in the middle of shaking another bank to pieces to loot the rubble when they’d arrived in Las Vegas, and Baker had dropped Blue to bull straight in. Earthshaker had done…something, Blue couldn’t remember, and Baker had gone flying. Some kind of blast? Things got hazy again, and the last thing Blue remembered with crystal-clear certainty was diving between another one of those street-breaking blasts and -

“Butch,” he said again, a little louder this time, and a slew pebbles bounced off his head. He blinked - _he hadn’t moved, had he?_ \- and looked up. One wide eye looked back down at him, and the scrabbling mixed with shouts from above.

“Titan! Titan I found him, he’s under here!” The painfully young voice of nine-year-old Butch Baker echoed down the space between concrete slabs, and Blue suppressed a groan as it bounced off his headache. Butch was a good kid, but living with Baker was doing nothing for his discretion or volume control.

Indistinct sounds answered the young sidekick, and he looked up at someone. “This is like half a building! I can’t lift that much, and Blue can’t either. Please, you have to help him.” Butch’s eye reappeared in the gap, looking down anxiously. “Blue! Blue, Titan’s on his way, he’ll get you out. Are you okay?”

Blue coughed wetly, unable to suppress the urge any longer. A spray of red splattered the concrete in front of him, and he could feel more blood dripping down his chin as he bit down on a groan of agony. “Chunk of rebar through my lung,” he called back, voice weaker than he’d like. He didn’t want to spook the kid, but Baker could be awfully negligent when it came to tossing thirty-ton chunks of anything around and while Blue would heal from this - he _always_ healed, some things just took more time than others - the rebar was preventing his body from fixing the lung. The less stress he put on it now, the faster he’d heal up later.

The visible eye widened for a moment, then vanished. “Uncle Bob, you gotta help him now, he’s hurt real bad!” Blue winced at the real fear in the kid’s voice; he’d seen Blue heal before, but it never seemed to comfort him when he had to see it again.

“He’ll be fine, _Kid Titan_. It takes more than that to put a true-blue hero down!” Blue didn’t miss the not-so-subtle stress Baker put on the kid’s sidekick moniker. Baker could do subtlety like a shambling sewer monster could do a beauty pageant; badly. Apparently there were enough people around that Baker wanted to leave a good impression. God forbid a scared kid call out for his uncle.

The concrete slab in front of Blue shifted, and he blinked against the sudden light. Two faces looked down at him, one with concern written all over the parts not covered by a yellow bandana and the other with an easy smile smeared all over it.

Titan laughed. “Well! It seem the true-blue hero has gotten himself into some true-blue trouble. Let me help you with that, friend,” he said as he reached down and pulled Blue from his hollow in the rubble.

Blue bit down on a hiss as the rebar came with him. “ _Please_ get it out,” he said from between clenched teeth, gesturing towards the chunk of rebar that was beginning to drip blood onto the concrete with a steady _tick-tick-tick_.

Butch looked a little green, but Baker just laughed and grabbed the rebar to pull it out in one swift motion. A fountain of blood followed, and Blue couldn’t help collapsing like someone cut his strings. Butch caught him under one arm and held him as he hacked out the last of the blood in his lungs, already feeling the deep-tissue itch that signaled healing. He reached over as best he could and patted the kid’s head.

He’d be all right.


End file.
